Proxmox is definitely on its way to become a viable replacement for sure. There’s also OpenShift from Red Hat which could be worth a look at as well.
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Doctorzoidy@lemmynsfw.com 3 weeks ago
I realize there’s all sorts of Microsoft hate out there, mostly justified, but no one has mentioned hyper-v as a replacement for VMware. I’ve got a dozen or so machines running on a single VMware host and after the broadcom buyout decided to swap over, havent pulled the trigger yet as I’m using it to get a new server and wait for our support contract to end.
In the small/medium business space is proxmox a better bet?
Matty_r@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
jj4211@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Openshift kind of incidentally does virtualization almost begrudgingly. Red hat started to try to be a VMware competitor with ovirt but find VMware customers too stuck in their ways, then abandoned it to chase the cloud buzz word with open stack, but open stack was never that good and also the market for people who want to make their on premise stuff act like a cloud provider is actually not that big anyway. So they hopped on the container buzzword with open shift and stuck libvirt management in there to have an excuse for virtualization customers that there is a migration path for them.
Meanwhile proxmox scratched their head wondering why everyone was fixated on stacking abstraction layer upon abstraction layer on libvirt and just directly managed the qemu. Which frankly makes their stuff a lot more straightforward technically, and their implementation is a solid realization of the sort of experience that VMware provides. In fact much more straightforward than a typical VMware deployment, and easier to care and feed since it is natively Linux instead of an OS pretending not to be an os like esxi. It also is consistent to manage, unlike VMware where you must at least interact some with esxi but that’s deliberately crippled and then you have to do things a bit differently as you deploy center (which can be weirdly convoluted).
jj4211@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’d say that if you tend to like Microsoft products, then hyper v. If you tend to be annoyed by then but like Linux, then proxmox is great. It manages to be a good blend of approachable with a GUI but also having solid API and cli that didn’t overly abstract things away from the underlying implementation
But if you aren’t really a Linux person, then I’d wager hyper v is the right direction.
shalafi@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Another vote for Hyper-V.
Rugtert@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
I had a great experience with hyper-v. 2 nodes running about 60 vms for 7 years.
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 3 weeks ago
Hyper-V could literally suck my dick all day and I still wouldn’t use it if there’s a non-microsoft option that works. Not interested in being the test group for any more of their shit or get rug-pulled at the worst moment.
rmuk@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
Yeah, if you’re used to Microsoft servers and have a Microsoft network it integrates really nicely and is great to manage. Plus, it’s free.
BritishJ@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Its not free. You need to license the base windows server. They killed the free hyper-v server offering.
Evotech@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
That’s basically free compared to vmware
Tja@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
It’s also basically free compared to a mountain of gold. But xen and proxmox and virt-manager and a bunch of others can be really free.
AA5B@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I haven’t yet set up proxmox, but yeah, I think hyper-V would work well in a small to medium windows shop.
The negatives I found probably don’t apply
- for large installations, it never scaled as well as VMware. We saved millions on licenses when we switched, but had to buy a lot more hardware. In particular we were doing software QA where we needed many VMs but they didn’t need much resources, and hyper-v just couldn’t scale in that direction. More standard use cases probably won’t have this problem, plus this was 4 years ago so I don’t know if anything has changed
- for special case installations, hyper-v was a horrible experience on my laptop. I had the resources, but couldn’t pass through usb devices, and it kept messing up my networking.
scarilog@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’m surprised I haven’t seen Nutanix mentioned at all here tbh. Direct competitor to VMware.
serenissi@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Give bhyve a try. Especially on illumos host.
thejag52@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
From my experience running heavily Hyper-V over the last 15 years, don’t be afraid of it, it’s worth the look. Especially for a single node like you’re talking, no reason not to in my opinion.